A Twitter conversation between two much-followed EU-oriented bloggers over the weekend caught my eye. I won’t identify them as you need to follow them on Twitter to see their tweets. It started when one asked whether anyone out there “still thinks that blogging is in any way likely to have an impact … why should [...]

On 14 June 2009 the Irish Independent reported that Margot Wallstrom, European Commissioner for Communication, said during a visit to Dublin that the Lisbon Treaty would “encourage” affordable childcare in the EU.A question was tabled to her in the Eur…

In an extraordinary admission today Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary confesses to his real motives behind his €500,000 campaign for a ‘yes’ vote in the Irish referendum on Friday.He said: “One of the reasons that I am campaigning for a ‘yes’ vote is that…

Geothermal energy is currently at least understood type of renewable energy sources, says Mr. John Lund in an interview with Geothermania blog. At the same time, it is still waiting to be more researched, especially if we talk about the new geothermal segment called Hot dry rock. Mr. Lund declares that EGS is a long-term [...]

The German elections for the upper house of parliament, the so-called Bundestag, produced a number of unexpected and even historic results over the past weekend. While many political observers and forecasting institutes were predicting a tightening electoral race during the last days of campaigning, the final verdict of the German electorate proved much more clear [...]

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I’m told these days that interests and politics are interlinked and can hardly if ever become mutually exclusive. Why should the Constitutional Court (Prague) give an opinion on the constitutionality of the Treaty of Lisbon? I can take two routes in understanding this: the naive or the skeptic/critical/analytical one. If I decide to trust it [...]

Sir, Regarding ‘Can the EU pave the way for electric cars?‘: 1. The range of noticeable electric vehicles (EVs) are sufficient to meet the daily driving needs of more than 95% of drivers. The vast majority of people (95%) drive less than 100/km a day, and 82% drive 40 miles or less a day, [...]

Sir, Regarding ‘Eurosceptic Czech senators put Lisbon Treaty on hold‘: I am just an amateur historian, but I try to learn history so that I avoid committing the same errors made in the past. From the little I know, the Czech Republic is a rich and industrious land which was in the world’s top five [...]

I’m not very optimistic these days. Either the Irish will say no (níl) to the Lisbon Treaty, which I think they will be wise enough not to do this time, or the Czech ‘no’ (ne) camp around Klaus will keep the ratification on ice for several months, waiting for the British Tories to come on [...]

Sir, Regarding ‘EU to declare war on business trips‘: Video-conferencing is a subsection of the more general category ‘teleworking’. The rules governing successful teleworking were formalised in the 1970s and 1980s. Early adopters included ICL who used it extensively amongst its programmers. Teleworking tends to work best with functions that are not ‘customer facing’. Where [...]

It’s been a week since the Calais incident, so what happens now and at what level? The emotional, social, and political aftershocks from France’s raid and closure of the Calais migrant camp would have probably stayed in the headlines and fed the political commentary machinery for some time, had they not been swept aside by [...]

MEP Corina Cretu’s passionate but largely misguided arguments on Blogactiv in favour of the missile shield go to prove my point, namely the fact that it had been designed to contain Russia, not Iran. What is really puzzling about the whole argument is that before being an MEP, Ms Cretu was former president Ion Iliescu’s [...]

Sir, Regarding ‘EU policymaking: Rooted in science?‘: I really do think that politicians will arguably look to their interests in winning votes before anything else. We can sadly translate this into he who better lobbies or markets his ideas the right way will decide the future (although this is unproven). The ‘precautionary principle’ adds to [...]

Just received a ridiculous survey to fill in from Gallup Europe, which is working on behalf of ‘Friends of Europe’ – a Brussels-based outfit that gets most of its funding from the European Commission.The survey asks questions about the EU’s ‘communi…